Attempted carjacker leaves behind his pants

An attempted carjacking in the Inland Empire ended with the suspect running away without his pants. Surveillance video caught the incident. On Monday evening, the victim was parked along Adam Street in Murrieta while using his cell phone. A stranger approached his vehicle.

"He had his window partially down and so he was concerned for his own safety and began driving away form the curb and at that point in time, the suspect ran up to the passenger's side of the vehicle, dove into the passenger's side of the window in what appears to be an attempted carjacking," said Lt. Dennis Vrooman, Murrieta Police.

The victim sped away with the suspect hanging onto the car. Cameras from a commercial building nearby got a brief shot of the incident. A few seconds later, the victim's car went over a curb and hit a wire on a utility pole. The car's airbags deployed. The suspect then for some unexplained reason left his jeans, his work boots and boxer shorts and ran away across over a half mile of open fields.

There was a pretty active search for the man using helicopters and a dog. Investigators found out that the man had spent the night at a nearby Lutheran church.

"He would've broken in through one of the windows then gone up in the ceiling to avoid the motion detectors and hid out in the drop ceiling and try to bandage himself up there and eventually just falling through the ceiling back on the floor and spending the night in the room," explained Pastor Chris Deknatel, Promise Lutheran Church.

It is believed that the suspect found clothing inside the church. Why the suspect left his clothes and work boots remains puzzling. Because of his unusual behavior, police hope to identify him and make an arrest.

"It was pretty gutsy of what he did, that he took the initiative to try and get into someone's car during essentially daylight hours so who knows what he's capable of or what he's done in the past," said Vrooman.